The Cutdown Episode 8: CATS Out of the Mailbag

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In this episode we discuss the internet destroying trailer for the live-action version of CATS, as well as the trailer for Top Gun: Maverick. And we answer your questions about our favorite trailers, and the future of the movie and game trailer industry.

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I'm totally with you on the Sin City trailer - I was a big fan of the comics and this trailer got me so excited. It was the early days of being able to easily view trailers online, and I went through this one frame by frame, as much as technology would allow. Apparently that second track is an instrumental version of Cells by The Servant, the original of which was also used in The Transporter a few years earlier. It's cheesy but propulsive and kind of Wild Westy, so it's a great choice. The film turned out to make a lot of bad choices on what to keep and what to drop, sadly.

I think this is the right one:

Similarly, the Watchmen trailer had a great vibe, helped by another great music choice (a deliberate, sleazy Smashing Pumpkins track which is an alternative version of a track they wrote for Batman & Robin), a great look and more exact panel recreations to pause on. And similarly again, the film turned out to be... misguided.

Again, I'm pretty sure this is the right one, but there are some slightly different edits out there and there often doesn't seem to be much attention put into formalised naming of different trailer versions:

In fact, I think superhero adaptations are generally a good place to go when trying to find great trailers for awful movies. The Green Lantern trailer was really promising as well!

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Yeah, those are the ones we were talking about. I think there were two Sin City trailers, but they both used the same music. The Watchmen teaser cut to music from Koyaanisquatsi was also very good, again because of the practically made-for-trailer shots from the movie.

The trailer naming scheme is very inconsistent. Sometimes on the Apple site they even use letters and numbers which look like they're taken straight from the production designations, so you could even have a trailer 1, 3 and 4 but no 2. Or sometimes they're A, B and C. There doesn't seem to be a hard and fast industry standard rule, and sometimes I think letters or numbers got skipped because a trailer got very far, but was then never released, in favor of a new one which was a number higher

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Did you mention Watchmen in the 'cast? The Koyaanisquatsione is also cool, but I prefer the Pumpkins one, partly because it sticks to one track (as far as I can tell) and has a lot less dialogue.

I wouldn't mind naming inconsistencies so much if at least each trailer was publicly given specific designations for each of its versions and all the people on YouTube used those names instead of just calling all of them "official trailer"!